Personal files in your SharePoint? noooooo….

Why did you do that?

I saw more than once this year: a user created an Office 365 Group called “John – Personal” so that he can store his own files and not share the site with anyone.

It’s so easy to create a site (or office 365 group & team) nowadays that it is common practice.

Now, what happens when you leave the business or take other responsibilities? Your site doesn’t follow you to the new department or gets deleted automatically after your leave.

Moreover, when – finally – the content management needs to be analysed and re-organised (as I do all the time for clients), we would put a big “question mark” next to any personal site and the MD of the business will likely give us the go-ahead to delete it (aouch !)

Why this happened?

The justification given is that “we have been told not to use OneDrive”.

Really...!?

More likely these reasons:

Told not to use OneDrive personal, for work but OneDrive for Business is ok”, except that it was misunderstood

Told not to use OneDrive for final version/company documents that we sent to clients, except that it was misunderstood

and finally, this one was SOOOOO true: OneDrive Sync is %$&£ !!! (replace with a swear word!)

That last one was VERY true, but since September 2017 the Sync client has improved so much that it actually works! And it is even the same for SharePoint libraries, with the same name : “OneDrive sync” just to confuse everyone.

So, go for it! Use your OneDrive for Business to store your temporary files, files that you think colleagues shouldn’t have access such as “work in progress” and drafts.

But don’t use SharePoint site just for 1 user. It’s like “giving jam to pigs” (French expression, may be quite unrelated actually ;-)

Merry Christmas !

(now I go back moving some SharePoint content back into people's OneDrive!)

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Published by Francois Souyri

French native living in London, for over 10 years François built applications with the end-user in mind before UX term became mainstream. Crossway between a designer, developer and system architect, he prefers stretching the limit of out-of-the-box features rather than breaking them into code.
View all posts by Francois Souyri